The Lego Movie: 'waves the flag for free-form invention'. The repositioning of luddite Lego bricks as a saleable staple of the digital gaming revolution is one of the greatest marketing coups of the 21st century. Parents who grew up assembling brightly coloured building blocks in the age of the Bakelite telephone were amazed to find their children playing Lego Harry Potter for DS or Lego Star Wars for Wii, the brand name meaning as much to their computer-literate offspring as it did to them. Terrific to report, then, that The Lego Movie does nothing to undermine the Danish dynamo's ongoing reputation as a purveyor of fine entertainment for kids of all ages. While younger viewers will delight at the whiz-bang animation action and hugely likable familiar figures, adults will laugh themselves silly at the smart consumer satire gags and goggle in wonder at the undulating Legoland vistas. Tipping its head toward the self-aware set-up of Wreck-It Ralph (via the Tour Guide Barbie sequence from Toy Story 2), The Lego Movie casts (un)happy plastic construction worker Emmet (Chris Pratt) as an accidental hero when President Business (Will Ferrell) attempts to obliterate nonconformist creativity with the aid of an instruction manual and some glue.
Teaming up with Batman, Wyldstyle and other assorted contrarians, Emmet waves the flag for free-form invention, which appears to be Lego's rallying cry. The denouement may be a super-soppy sales pitch, but the surreal slapstick sensibilities of Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs writers/directors Lord and Miller consistently undermine any corporate guff. You'll come out singing theme tune Everything is Awesome in only mildly ironic fashion.The LEGO Batman Movie review: All other Batman parodies are now defunct Sorry, this LEGO Movie spin-off has made every Batman joke possible, so the rest of you might as well go home Saturday 4 February 2017 11:05 GMT It's intriguing, in a way, to see The LEGO Batman Movie hit the scene exactly a full year after Deadpool's trumpeted arrival. The hope, obviously, is that kids won't have seen the latter (pray for good parenting); yet, for adults, the comparison may be hard to ignore. We've re-entered the realm of the meta-superhero narrative and, honestly, it's The LEGO Batman Movie which actually emerges triumphant.
Call it the boon of opportunity which arrives hand-in-hand with animation, but it commits fully to its fourth-wall-breakage and endless self-referencing in a way which simply outlasts its live-action compatriot. Buckle in and hold on tight, because the jokes start dropping as early as the studio logos and only relent once we're deep into end credits territory. A spin-off of 2014's wildly successful The LEGO Movie it may be, but it's hard to consider this film as anything other than a one-shot deal; Warner Bros. have thrown everything into the ring here, and you'd be hard-pressed to find a single Batman joke that isn't exploited here, much less any wiggle room for a sequel. Every age, every iteration becomes prime target for parody: from the whiz-bang camp of the '60s TV show to Tom Hardy's indecipherable mumbles in The Dark Knight Rises. Even Gentleman Ghost gets a brief shout-out: a gentleman, a ghost, and possibly the least expected Batman villain ever to make it screen.
Will Arnett's welcome return, after his scene-stealing turn in The LEGO Movie, continues a vocal performance which expertly combines every Batman that's come before; all combined with the fragile ego of a man who's Instagrammed every single gym session he's ever undertaken, as he now attempts to stop short the Joker (Zach Galifianakis)'s plans to conquer Gotham, while finding himself saddled with a newly-adopted son in Robin (Michael Cera). If this all sounds a little exhausting, worry not: LEGO Batman nimbly manages to pull off this kind of hyperspeed humour through the sheer level of quality being maintained, interspersing its silliness with pointed jabs at Batman's place in pop culture, getting right to the heart of the matter in a way Zack Snyder's excessively sombre Batman v Superman never dared. That includes the admittance that, despite his iconic appeal, we're talking about a character who represents something of an authoritarian elite; certainly, a tax-dodger if he's managing both the upkeep of the Batcave and all of its ludicrous gadgets.
Or, as the film succinctly puts it, he's essentially "an unsupervised adult man karate-chopping poor people". With any superhero movie, inevitably, come the shadow of the shared universe; however, LEGO Batman keeps its references to its cinematic predecessor refreshingly minimal, though a continued giddy attitude towards its property mash-up ethos once more ends up being a driving force behind the film. 37 Films to get excited about in 2017 Which is exactly where the film may prove its most divisive: either charming its viewers with the straight enthusiasm of its arsenal of pop culture references, or gaining its contractors through that oncoming stench of merchandising opportunities. Neither does the film engage with the breadth of emotions which made The LEGO Movie such an instant treasure, choosing instead to invest squarely in its gloriously chaotic action setpieces. Yet there's no doubt, The LEGO Batman Movie delivers a deliriously fun ride that likely to stand up surprisingly well amongst the rest of this year's superhero films.
The LEGO Batman Movie hits cinemas 10 February. The LEGO Batman MovieIt's hardly news that life has got a lot worse for a lot of people since the financial crisis hit. Inequality is on the rise, and with it alienation from the worlds of business and politics, which carry on as if nothing has really changed. Many of us brood on the abyss – the sense that, in some large, inchoate way, we are nearing the end of life as we know it. Yet no cohesive vision of an alternative has emerged. We seem to be stuck. The movies have not been slow to tap into this widespread sense of anxiety and even despair. Our screens have been filled with images of urban collapse and apocalyptic destruction, dystopian wastelands and zombie hordes. But, like Washington and Westminster, Hollywood has been better at scaring us with the threat of calamity than inspiring hope for the new. Finally, however, the studio system has delivered a vision of a radical paradigm shift, a way out of the impasse.
I'm talking, of course, about The Lego Movie – a 3D computer-animated family adventure based on a corporate toy range that turns out to be Hollywood's answer to the Occupy movement. The Lego Movie tells the story of Emmet, a conspicuously average member of the ultra-peppy Lego society: yellow head, curved hands, job in construction (what else?) and super-positive attitude. Everything is awesome until he is anointed by an underground resistance movement as the "Special" – the one person who can save the world from the secret scheming of its nefarious leader. The film's exuberant, kid-friendly larks – Wild West! – are laced with satirical digs at surveillance culture, built-in obsolescence and police brutality, as well as inane positive thinking. Its opening sequences show a world in which a pliant, consumerist populace, mollified by overpriced coffee and dumb TV shows, is exploited by cynical leadership; political and corporate power are conflated in the villainous figure of "President Business" (Will Ferrell).
Most fascinating is President Business's masterplan and our heroes' response to it: he hopes to make the status quo a permanent reality by literally gluing everyone in place. A society doesn't get more stuck than that. Emmet, meanwhile, must learn to stop slavishly following "the instructions", improvise and think the unthinkable. The way forward is found in the hybrid, the mutant, the absurd – the different. In other words, the crux of the drama is not whether the world will be saved or destroyed. It's whether "Do not touch" will triumph over "You can still change everything". It's that small shift – from staking everything on the preservation of the familiar to embracing the unknown – that makes The Lego Movie remarkable. And this is where the comparison with Occupy comes in. The value of that movement wasn't in its ability to present a viable alternative model for the organisation of society. Clearly, it hasn't done that. Its value was in its insistence that it's worth exploring the options.
The Lego Movie does something similar. I'm not proposing it as a work of leftist agitprop – it remains, after all, a giant billboard for a multinational company – or suggesting it offers a viable blueprint for post-neoliberal civics. But, like Occupy, it asserts that it's OK – exciting, even – to consider how society could be structured differently. It invites us to imagine other worlds. It's not really surprising, then, that the Hollywood logjam of spectacles of despair should be broken by a kids' movie. The Lego movie is a celebration of the untrammeled imagination, the urge to have fun jumbling ideas together and finding meaning in the mess, however unconventional. It's a quintessentially childlike sensibility, and one we could all use a bit more of. "I know things seem bad right now but there is a way out of it," the movie insists. The fact that a sequel is already in the works suggests that Emmet and his pals will now be faced with a challenge far more formidable than ending the world: making a new one.